Best ways to move your business forward

A website is the best way to move your business forward. It's not as expensive as you think, and when done properly can give you more return on your investment than most other forms of “traditional” advertising and promotion. Let's take look at 10 reasons why your business needs a website. Most of these will apply to your company!

1. A Website Can Generate a Professional Image
A professionally designed website is one of the best ways to instill confidence in new customers who are not familiar with your company. It gives the impression they are dealing with a firm they can trust and will generate a sense of respectability.

2. Business Information Available
List your address, phone numbers, fax numbers, hours of operation and special offerings.
3. A Website is the Ideal Promotional Tool
Unlike the yellow pages, you can update your customer offerings at any time. Plus it’s cheaper and quicker to update your website than printed materials such as brochures and flyers!

4. Sell More Products
Millions of people purchase products from the internet each day, creating billions of dollars sold by e-commerce businesses.

5. Provide Research Information
Consumers spend hours of time researching potential businesses, products, and services prior to making an educated purchase.

7. Open International Markets
With a business website, you can reach international markets just as easy as the consumer across the street. Your website can be reached by anyone with access to the internet.

8. Create a 24 Hour Service
The internet may be open 24 hours, but typically your business is not. Websites can serve your clients, visitors, and partners 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

9. Customer Feedback
Having brochures, catalogs, sales material will not always generate sales or leads. With a website, you can ask for and receive customer feedback without extra cost.
10. Help People Make Quick Decisions
Provide product or service information, prices, and specifications so visitors and customers can make quick informed decisions.

Whether you decide to design and build your own website or hire a professional, don't let your competition leave you behind. Start increasing your sales and service by getting your business online today!

According to the so-called experts, a decent conversion ratio is right around one percent only. In other words, one out of every one hundred visitors to your website converts to a sale.

So, how we improve our website's conversion ratio?

Personally, I think you should ignore what the experts say, and strive to achieve as high a conversion ratio as possible. You should never be satisfied. You should always be looking for ways to improve your conversion ratio. My website consistently converts anywhere from 3 to 5 percent, and often converts as high as ten percent!

Unless you're selling a big-ticket item and making $100 or more per sale, it's extremely difficult to make any real money with only a one percent conversion ratio.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and if your website is attracting hundreds or even thousands of visitors a day, then obviously you can do quite well with one percent or lower conversion ratio.

But what if you don't have that kind of traffic–and most websites don't. Then what? What if you're selling a $20 ebook and you're only attracting a hundred visitors a day to your website? With a one percent conversion ratio, that means your website is making a measly $20 a day. And believe me, that's much more common than you realize.

However, what if you could improve your conversion ratio to 3 percent? 5 percent? All of a sudden, you're making $60 to $100 a day with the same amount of traffic. Improve your conversion ratio to ten percent and voila, that $100 a day turns into $200 a day!

So, how do you go about improving your website's conversion ratio? Here are some tips that should help:

1. Make sure your visitors know what you do, the instant they land on your website. Don't make them have to guess. Tell them right up front with a benefits-laden headline.

2. Make sure the design of your website is up to par? Make it easy to navigate. Get rid of distracting flash or stupid, meaningless graphics that are a waste of everybody's time and take forever to load? Simplify your website. Get rid of the flash, graphics, and pop-ups!

3. Use psychologically effective colors. The color blue suggests quality, trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness–the perfect choice for sales pages. Avoid purple, which connotes uncertainty and ambiguity, and only use yellow to highlight keywords and phrases. In addition, try to have as much white space as possible. This makes for a much cleaner looking, easier to read a website.

4. Get your own domain name. URL's that contain names like, “Geocities”, “Angelfire” or “Tripod” has amateur written all over them.

5. Prove what you say. Back up your claims with cold, hard, indisputable and verifiable facts?

7. Use authentic customer testimonials, complete with first and last names? Just make sure you get your customers permission first.

8. Offer a fair and reasonable money-back guarantee? Thirty days is good. Sixty or ninety days is better!

9. Make it easy for your customers to pay. And offer a variety of payment options. I can assure you, if you're using Paypal only, you're losing sales. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, that just won't do business with Paypal. It's too much of a hassle!

10. And last but not least, make sure you have a powerful sales letter. A strong and effective sales letter can blast your earnings into the upper stratosphere!

If you aren't capable of writing that type of sales letter yourself, hire a copywriting expert to write it for you.

Follow the 10 steps set forth in this article, and your website's conversion ratio will improve dramatically–and so will your profits!